Reader Phil Primeau (Defend Canada) has read the IPCC report so you don’t have to. His summary;
1. Using Data and Observations since 1970, we have witnessed evidence of a warming trend. We are between 90% and 95% certain that in the last 37 years there has been a warming trend that has caused changes such as early blossoming, changed behavior in native species etc.
2. Based on this warming trend, we are 66% confident that this is caused by man. In that 66% confidence level, we believe that if it is caused by man, we are 90% certain it is due to the rises in manmade CO2 since 1950. This is based on “models” that look at natural or external impacts and internal impacts – and the combination of both best fit what we would expect the result to be. That being said, “Limitations and gaps prevent more complete attribution of the causes of observed system responses to anthropogenic warming … the available analyses are limited in the number of systems and locations considered …. natural temperature variability is larger at the regional than the global scale, thus affecting identification of changes due to external forcing”. (In other words, we are flying by the seat of our pants on this conclusion)
3. “Nevertheless, the consistency between observed and modelled changes in several studies and the spatial agreement between significant regional warming and consistent impacts at the global scale is sufficient to conclude with high confidence that anthropogenic warming over the last three decades has had a discernible influence on many physical and biological systems.” (Despite the shortcomings in our model, and the fact we could only get 300 scientists to agree to a 66% certainty, we the editors of said document think our models are accurate, and that being said, we are going to say we are 95% confident that global warming is manmade anyways, despite lack of concensus.)
4. Other effects of regional climate changes on natural and human environments are emerging, although many are difficult to discern due to adaptation and non-climatic drivers. We are 50% sure that northern crops benefit an early spring, 50% sure that forests are more likely to be affected by wildfire and pests. We are 50% sure that heat related diseases (i.e. transferred by mosquitos) are more prevalent, and 50% sure that there are more allergens. We are alos 50% sure that warming is having a negative impact on winter sports. (Only 50% sure….really?)
5. Recent climate changes and climate variations are beginning to have effects on many other natural and human systems. However, based on the published literature, the impacts have not yet become established trends. Despite uncertainty, there may be a trend of glacial melting causing flood, there may be a trend to longer dry seasons in Africa, and there may be a trend of Coastal flooding. (all completely uncertain, because of lack of data)
6. Based on current trends, (which lack confidence and enough data to judge anything properly by our own admission) (i equate this to making a future stock price prediction based on looking at 3 months of the stock price) these are our predictions:
a) By 2050, Wet areas will get wetter by 10% – 40%. Dry areas will get drier by 10% – 30%.
b) By 2050, 20% – 30% of species will go extinct (if they don’t adapt as they have for the past billion years)
c) by 2050, 1-3 degree increase which will affect dry regions negatively and wet regions positively
d) by 2080 coast will be at risk (but we are not saying to what degree they might be affected)
e) Rich areas will get richer, poor areas poorer – mostly based on existing geo-economic situations.
It goes on….but all of the predictions are based on self admitted lack of evidence…
At Prometheus, attention is drawn to a chart correlating “weather related catastrophes compared with global temperatures”;
The Figure below is found in the IPCC WG II report, Chapter 7, supplementary material (p. 3 here in PDF). I am shocked to see such a figure in the IPCC of all places, purporting to show something meaningful and scientifically vetted. Sorry to be harsh, but this figure is neither.
I am amazed that this figure made it past review of any sort, but especially given what the broader literature on this subject actually says. I have generally been a supporter of the IPCC, but I do have to admit that if it is this sloppy and irresponsible in an area of climate change where I have expertise, why should I have confidence in the areas where I am not an expert?
Not surprisingly, competent analysts have considered these issues in detail. [….] once you normalize for population, wealth and inflation at the national level, there is a weak upward trend in normalized weather-related disaster losses only if you include the 2004 / 2005 hurricane season. The authors are explicit that that US losses dominate these numbers and that a shift in US population into more vulnerable areas in Florida probably accounts for any trend.
It took me 15 minutes on Google to find the relevant research, and maybe two hours to assimilate it. Apparently this was too much work for 2,500 scientists.
Related – The Great Global Warming Swindle is now available on DVD via Amazon(UK).
When Lorne Calvert introduces Al Gore in Regina the crowd should yell “Swindle” and flash the DVD but then most prairie bumpkins who shell out the money to see Al will believe everything he says.
What a stage containing a ferret and a weasel at once!
What a colorful picture you paint Scott! Don’t forget the gopher – the rodents paying to see this rodent fest- ‘if dey go fer dis day will go fer anyting’ – thinks Culvert/gore/may-Deyawn.
Jema54
To expand the analogy….they see us as the gophers…..the natural prey of ferrets and weasels. How appropriate on Small Dead Animals.
Syncro
Ferets and weasels prey on gophers and all rodents fear them. In the last prov election the ferret used fear to win. If you introduce a ferret into a rat infestation they will leave as have the gophers from Saskatchewan to Alberta.
Fear of loss is the stongest motivation in the world, much stronger than the hope for gain.If you tell an employee they will lose there job if they don’t produce it motivates them more than the hope for a bonus if the company does well!
“Using Data and Observations since 1970, we have witnessed evidence of a warming trend.”
WOW.They went back a whole 37 years. I can beat them.Since 6 PM last night we have had a cooling trend,soon to be a warming trend around 8 AM.
5000 years ago,the Sahara desert was a rich,lush almost savannah like region. Then around 3000 B.C. those damn Egyptians with their industrial revolution changed it into the second largest desert in the world (Antarctica #1).
This isn’t a science report that the IIPC has put out.It isn’t even pseudo-science.It is nothing more then a not-so-hidden agenda by money lusting guys like Gory,Mo,Dr.Fruitfly,and the U.N. to obtain bucks from the stupid. Personally, I say go for it. Not that you will be getting any of mine.But remember.Unlike the lemmings you so routinely and blithely suck in,I bite back.
“due to the rises in manmade CO2 since 1950”
Ohhh…this is fun…manmade CO2. Man does not make CO2,it is a naturally occuring chemical,like H2O,or O,or Pb,or Sn.
Man does,however,create CO,which is a component of smog,which pollutes our air,but which no Kyoto Cultist wants to fight. WHY?
34% not confident and 50% unsure and 100% BS
Yes, there has been a warming from 1907s, but they were cooler than the 30s and 40s. Talking aboput cherry picking.
Also, by what mathematical formular can they say with 66% certainty or 50%?
Can we feed fruit-fly-guys to weasels and ferrets?
At last word, there were plenty of seats left for the Gore-Calvert photo op event.
I don’t quite know why, but every time I see these forecasts, I think of equity analysts’…
So if this summary os remotely unbiased. the hysteria over GW is totally unwarranted and there are huge gaps in the knowledge to make assumptions about cause and source.
Typical UN red hering.
Stick a fork in it it’s cooked….don’t eat this steaming heap yet Elmer.
A most unscientific *scientific* report.But what more would one have expected when considering the venue from which the report originated? Better odds than Vegas?
More to the point, consider the scientists who had the temerity to put their name to such findings. I am 66% confident that there is a 90% certainty that they do not have YOUR best interests at heart.
THE DAILY BLADE: Scientists Who Refuse To Toe The Line On Global Warming
The National Post of Canada is running a superb series on “scientists who buck the conventional wisdom on climate science.” Here are brief summaries of each segment of “The Deniers” series thus far:
† Edward Wegman believes that peer-reviewed climate science should be taken with a grain of salt, because the reviewers were often unqualified in statistics. He says that competent statisticians should reassess past studies and in the future, the climate science world should better incorporate statistical know-how. …-
more and links to articles here:
http://thestilettoblog.com/2007/03/07/the-daily-blade-scientists-who-refuse-to-toe-the-line-on-global-warming.aspx
Some of the basic laws of chemistry (Charle’s Law and Gay-Lussac’s Law) pertain to the pressure of gases in liquids at different temperatures. One of the corrolaries to these laws is that cold water can absorb more gas than warm water can.
Another way to say that is :It’s easier to dissolve gaseous carbon dioxide in cold water than in warm water. And more carbon dioxide can be dissolved in cold water than in warm water. That is, cold water can hold more CO2 than warm water can. And interestingly, by far the largest amount of greenhouse gas in our atmosphere is water (in the form of water vapour and condensed tiny water vapour droplets – clouds!)
The famous graph presented by Al Gore in his book and movie “An Inconveninet Truth” shows there is a relationship between the earth’s air temperature and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. They are absolutely correct in saying there is a relationship.
The relationship they claim is this: The higher the amount of CO2 the warmer the earth.
I submit that a correct application of these two laws of chemistry demonstrates that what the graph reveals is not at all what Gore, Suzuki and others claim. Rather it is just the opposite. It reveals that the warmer the atmosphere, the more CO2 will be in it because the oceans, lakes rivers and atmospheric moisture are less able to absorb the CO2 and it is then available for measurement in its free form as an atmospheric gas – not tied up with H2O molecules as carbonic acid.
So all those who are warning us about the perils of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere have gotten it wrong because they have either forgotten the simple principles of high school laws of chemistry or they never knew it in the first place because they did not take a high school chemistry course.
The net result is they are misleading those others who have either forgotten their high school chemistry or who also never took a high school chemistry course.
My favorite is Figure SPM-2, on page 4 of the February 2007 Summary for Policymakers (http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf). It describes the Level of Scientific Understanding (LOSU) for various radiative forcing components. Four of the nine components have LOSUs rated “Low” and two more are rated “Medium-Low”. In the figure caption, it also states “Additional forcing factors not included here are considered to have a very low LOSU.”
These are the basic building blocks of their models, and they readily admit that we don’t understand them. It’s mind boggling.
Heck you don’t have to go back 5000 years to North Africa being signgicatly less dry than now, or the last 100 years.
There was the “medieval warm period”, the “little ice age” in the 1600’s? (I forget exactly when.) in europe. The Roman empire conincided partially with a warm period too.( And I’m sure elsewhere, I’m no expert in Chinese weather history.
And then you have the 600? year (again the exact period length escapes me) periodicity in recorded history of horse cultures (semi nomads) sweeping out of central asia and doing doom upon the ancient worlds civilizations. Yah think that might be caused by climate change, maybe?
Climate change happens, the only real problem that the world is so overcrowed that there’s nowhere to move to find somewhere more agreable that’s not already filled with other people horrified by new neighbours.
Ok, maybe Saskatchewan would like more people… I got your 200 million spare chinese right here.
I am amused by the frequent use of ‘trend’ projections by the AGW people who are increasingly looking like blind fanatics.
W J Burroughs in his excellent book WEATHER CYCLES, Real or Imaginary?, makes the observation that our earthly climate has the habit of jumping from one state of ‘normal weather’ to a different state of ‘normal weather’ and staying there for undetermined lengths of time.
And if the change lasts for more than 2 or 3 generations of man, what constitutes ‘normal’ weather to the following generations?
Therefore a 37 year sample period (all the way from 1970 wow!) is totally useless in making any sort of predictions about future climate.
That’s like sampling western prairie climate during a period of drought (1998 to 2002) and projecting continuing droughts forever.
BTW, anybody wanna guess how many prairie acres are probably not going to get seeded this year of 2007 due to EXCESS moisture?
Since this process has been going on since the beginning of time, it’s really hard to get all worked up over ‘scientists’ who sprinkle percentages of ‘certainty’ in their reports like raindrops from a thunderstorm.
This argument is fast coming to an end.
Did you hear about the New Yorker that came out to the wild west and wanted to test the old Indian weather predicter?
He asked the Indian what kind of a winter it was going to be.
The old Indian told him it was going to be very cold.
The New Yorker marvelled and asked him how he knew that.
The sage old Indian told the Easterner that he could tell it by the huge piles of chopped wood outside the cabins of the whitemen.
I have managed to reduce the IPCC report down to this…. Burning causes warming. This “Fact” has been known since we monkeys started playing with fire. Could it be that global warming is caused by humans producing heat? Maybe what we need to do is start wearing more clothing. Even going so far as to wear more furs, wool sweaters etc.
truthsayer….how about more cotton from them sheep? Oh wait. Don’t sheep fart and produce methane? Ummmm….hozabout we just tell the eco-nuts to STFU and build some true enviro-friendly nuclear plants?
Orrrrrrr….we could all just stop producing any heat.
Alarmism puts scientists right in the centre of things. Sober, moderate nuanced assessment relegates them to the inside pages. Don’t forget Ball’s First Law of Scientific Thermodynasticism:
A=fp2 (Alarmism = funding * publicity squared).
There are two truisms at work today
“Increases in C02 lead to increased temperatures”, and
“Increases in global warming alarmism lead to increased funding and publicity”
…wait…I thought we were going into an ice age back in the 70’s.
There is a definite dip in the graph, yes, yes I see it! We were…
*whew* escaped that one…
To earlier comment by Russ, you don’t even need high school chemistry – just try to pour warm beer into a glass without getting too much foam head.
tomax7….ice age in the 70’s. That’s why they selected that time period to build their graphs from. You can’t have a scary increase unless you start at a low point! These guys are brilliant. Thanks for pointing that out.
BTW…currently in a snowfall warning for most of Southern Alberta,severe rainfall for Northern. So who’s warmer?
Oh wait.Southern AB has some things called mountains,which lift the moisture to colder temps,causing snow instead of rain. Or has GW cancelled out the globe’s average temp change of 2 deg F/1000′ of change in elevation?
The snowdrift in my back yard is finally gone & I was able to hang my laundry on the clothesline today. Do I qualify for carbon credits???
Fred; I have mentioned this before but wonder if anyone has ever done the math. The world is not overpopulated. We just have large populations concentrated in coastal areas.
Texas is 261,797 square miles-that is just the land mass not including water.
Population of world 2006- 6,525,170,264 persons.
If all the population was put into the state of Texas there would be :
1 person for each 1,118.51 square feet.
That does not seem like overpopulation of the world when you put it in that perspective. So maybe we should put the whole world population into Texas and then the rest of the world would be human vermin free like the eco-freaks want it.
Sorry Eliza, we have enough problems with illegals without you putting the rest of the world here. Mind you, Saskatchewan could use a few warm bodies (to pay taxes).
Global warming has reached its flashpoint, houses are being swallowed by the sea…
vocm.com/news-info.asp?id=20003
sorta…
Sigh. One can bafflegab with bull and spout statistics adnauseum, but it still all comes down to how people ‘feel’ about GW.
The leftoids recognize this element and understand that they have to get to the kids before they are able to weight fact over supposition. And here in BC, they’re doing exactly that.
‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is now being distributed to every school in the province, not as part of the official curriculum, but as a ‘learning tool’ for teachers. What percentage of the BC Teacher’s Federation will be pushing this agenda as unimpeachable fact? We are between 90% and 95% certain that nearly 100% will do so.
At the same time, the certainty of their showing any counter view, such as ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ will be nigh on to 0% – at least 19 times out of 20.
I wouldn’t mind so much if the kids were given both sides of the equation and then having them make up their own minds. Not going to happen.
Isn’t that an interesting manipulation of words when they are taken out of context?
66% confident that this is caused by man…
66% confidence level…
Alby, do their math:
– 95% “certain” earth has warmed in last 37 yrs
– 66% “confident” caused by man
– 90% “certain,” within 66% “confident,” caused by manmade CO2 since 1950.
95%*(66%*90%) = 56.43% “certainly confident” (statistically similar to flipping a coin)
I was sure the press releases from IPCC said 95% certainty that manmade CO2 emissions causing global warming.
This from models that have yet to work properly, to predict anything with any certainty (the opposite actually, it disproves their theory).
Then Al Gore takes this data and exaggerates it into 20 foot or so rise in sea levels.
Now we have environmentalist telling us Kyoto compliance will only cost $20 per week per family of four. What is their certainty on that?
IPCC using bait and switch – give us exagerrated and unsupported claims in summary, hoping we won’t notice when their actual data starts to come out. Well, we did notice.
This is the key part of the whole summery
A global assessment of data since 1970 has shown it is likely6 that anthropogenic
warming has had a discernible influence on many physical and biological systems.
Much more evidence has accumulated over the past five years to indicate that changes in many physical and
biological systems are linked to anthropogenic warming. There are four sets of evidence which, taken
together, support this conclusion:
1. The Working Group I Fourth Assessment concluded that most of the observed increase in the
globally averaged temperature since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase
in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.
2. Of the more than 29,000 observational data series7, from 75 studies, that show significant change in
many physical and biological systems, more than 89% are consistent with the direction of change
expected as a response to warming. (Figure SPM-1) [1.4]
3 A global synthesis of studies in this Assessment strongly demonstrates that the spatial agreement
between regions of significant warming across the globe and the locations of significant observed
changes in many systems consistent with warming is very unlikely to be due solely to natural
variability of temperatures or natural variability of the systems.(see Figure SPM-1) [1.4]
4 Finally, there have been several modelling studies that have linked responses in some physical and
biological systems to anthropogenic warming by comparing observed responses in these systems
with modelled responses in which the natural forcings (solar activity and volcanoes) and
anthropogenic forcings (greenhouse gases and aerosols) are explicitly separated. Models with
combined natural and anthropogenic forcings simulate observed responses significantly better than
models with natural forcing only. [1.4]
What it says is
1. That there is a 66% chance that problems with weather or biological systems seen since the 1950s have been caused by increases in global temperatures. Table SPM-2 indicated that 66% is forecast to increase over the coming decades depending where you live.
2. That the IPCC is “more than” 95% positive that increases in global temperatures since mid twentieth century is from increases in man made greenhouse gases.
It does not say
“Based on this warming trend, we are 66% confident that this is caused by man.”
This line from Phil Primeau stands out as complete idiocy.
“b) By 2050, 20% – 30% of species will go extinct (if they don’t adapt as they have for the past billion years)”
Sure species have adapted over time, but when rapid climate change occurs, mass extinctions happen before they have time to adapt.
Correction, that should read
2. That the IPCC is between 90 and 94% positive that increases in global temperatures since mid twentieth century is from increases in man made greenhouse gases.
What ever became of all that GLOBAL COOLING and the NEW IC EAGE we were suppost to be getting back in the 70s? GLOBAL WARMING IS A LIE